Tolstoy's text victimized by modern technology, laziness.

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In one of the truly bizarre incidents we've seen out of the e-book publishing world, a translation of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace for Barnes & Noble's Nook platform has replaced all mentions of the word "kindled" with "Nookd."

It appears to be a case of Ctrl-F gone wrong. An astute reader named Philip broke the story on his blog, noting that his reading of the classic was interrupted by the sentence "It was as if a light had been Nookd in a carved and painted lantern…" The blogger noticed more and more uses of the word "Nookd," leading him to examine a paper copy to find a more accurate translation that used the word "kindled" instead.

The best explanation, we think, comes from a commenter on the blog, who says "This obviously wasn't done by Barnes & Noble, but by the publisher who submitted the book to Barnes & Noble. They created a Kindle version of this public domain book first, realized they used 'Kindle' somewhere in their submission, and did a quick find-and-replace to change 'Kindle' to 'Nook'—never once thinking it would affect the book's text rather than just whatever they put in the title page."

Another blog post by Jonathan Zittrain, author of "The Future of the Internet and how to stop it," and Berkman Center research associate Kendra Albert, comes to a similar conclusion, noting that the "Nookd" version of War and Peace comes from a company called Superior Formatting Publishing.

We found eight mentions of the word "nookd" after downloading the e-book, as you can see here:

While we hate to see the text of a great writer like Tolstoy sullied by such silliness, at least it wasn't intentional (unlike that little incident involving the Amazon Kindle and George Orwell's 1984).